The Beach Boys, with Foster The People

Mike Love is the only member of the Beach Boys to remain on board this legendary Southern California band since its recording debut, 1961’s “Surfin’,” through to its current (one-year late) 50th anniversary tour. As such, he is understandably delighted to be back together for this unlikely reunion trek with band mastermind Brian Wilson and fellow alums David Marks, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston. But Love, 70, has another reason for being excited about tonight’s Beach Boys concert at Cricket Wireless Amphitheatre in Chula Vista.

“I like the fact that it’s right next to my home in Fairbanks Ranch,” he said, speaking from a tour stop in Pennsylvania.

Granted, Chula Vista does not exactly adjoin the ritzy North County neighborhood that Love and his family have called home for much of the past two years (they spend their summers at Lake Tahoe). But what’s a little geographic inaccuracy when you’re embarked on a reunion tour that almost no one, you and your fellow band members included, ever thought could happen in the first place?

“I’m very proud to be a part of it, but — no — I never would have thought this would be possible,” said Wilson, 69, the Beach Boys’ long-estranged creative wiz. He last collaborated with the group in the mid-1990s, and then only for a brief period, preferring to concentrate on his solo career.

“I think this is a special, one-time-only thing,” Love, who is Wilson’s cousin, agreed. “Our being together again, all of us as a group, re-establishes that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Indeed, few other bands have soared as high, or crashed as often (or as tragically), as the Beach Boys, whose new album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” comes out in June.

Between 1961 and 1966, with Wilson at the helm, the band evolved from an upbeat surf-rock combo — which celebrated hot cars, hotter girls and almost anything and everything related to surfing U.S.A. — into one of the most ambitious and accomplished bands in the world.

The Beach Boys also have the singular distinction of having profoundly inspired The Beatles, whose landmark 1967 album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” represented the Fab Four’s epic effort to outdo their American counterpart’s 1966 classic “Pet Sounds.”

But by 1967, things started to go very wrong. Wilson, who had stopped touring with the band a few years earlier to focus on songwriting and recording, suffered the first in a series of anxiety- and drug-fueled nervous breakdowns. He floated in and out of the band for several years, followed by an extended period of addiction, mental illness and a dramatic weight gain that made him almost unrecognizable.

Apart from his contributions to two of the band’s mid-1970s albums, “15 Big Ones” and “Love You,” Wilson went missing-in-action for increasingly long periods. His brother, Beach Boys drummer/singer Dennis Wilson, drowned in 1983. Guitarist/singer Carl Wilson, Brian’s other brother, died of cancer in 1998, 10 years after the Beach Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the release of Brian Wilson’s self-titled solo debut album.

Throughout it all, Love kept the Beach Boys going, in name if not spirit. He was undaunted by the fact that he was often the only original member in the group. He was also undaunted by the array of lawsuits that were filed by past and present members, including an effort to have Brian Wilson declared mentally incompetent and, thus, unfit to retain legal rights to the Beach Boys’ name and music. (That effort failed.)

“Well, I’m the lead singer and haven’t done what so many people in the music field have done, which is to become dependent on drugs, so what can I say?” Love mused.

“My cousin Dennis became dependent on alcohol and drugs. My cousin Carl, who smoked since he was 12 or 13, died of lung cancer. Brian, at one point, was a recluse because of doing LSD and other things. It has been me who has (provided) the continuity of the Beach Boys all these years, it’s true. …

“I think what this 50th anniversary tour does is celebrate the depth and breadth of the Beach Boys music in the best way we know how, which is to be totally inclusive with all the (surviving) historic members.”

In previous U-T San Diego interviews over the past several decades, Brian Wilson sounded wary and uncomfortable when Love’s name was mentioned. Yet, when asked last week how the Beach Boys’ reunion came about, Wilson offer a simple, matter-of-fact response.

“Michael Love called me and asked me if I wanted to do a 50th anniversary tour, and I said, ‘Yeah,’ ” Wilson said. “It was the first time I’d seen all the guys in a long time, and it was quite an emotional experience for us to get back together. I was surprised to see the guys could still sing as good as they could 50 years ago. I was a little worried at first; now, I’m not.”

Money, not surprisingly, is a major consideration, since the Beach Boys’ concert fees are much higher with Wilson back in the fold. The anniversary tour is playing in large amphitheaters, like Cricket, not intimate venues, like Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay, where the Wilson-less lineup has performed in recent years.

“There’s a lot of water, and history, under the bridge with these guys, plus (difficult) business relationships and everybody not being on the best of terms over the years,” said Jeffrey Foskett, a longtime member of Brian Wilson’s solo band and a Beach Boy alum who is back in the fold for this tour.

“I had a lot of trepidation, for Brian’s sake, and in general about this reunion. But the minute the first songs were sung last May, it sounded brilliant. That’s the thing about these guys. When all is said and done, they have always made great music together.”